question of who has the authority to decide what you should do in order to heal — or even what healing would look like for you. In our culture, doctors are often seen as allknowing priests, and friends and family tell us not to question that. Physicians’ input can be valuable, but many of them don’t distinguish well between what they know and don’t know. Missing from their knowledge base is what your individual soul is trying to enact, how your lifestyle and beliefs affect your health, and how your energies — which underlie the chemical behaviors of your body — flow and interact.
The authority we give doctors and scientists to define our individual and collective truth is sometimes taken to an extreme. The other day I read an article with the teaser: “Scientists have proven the existence of past lives.” The need to have something proven by science that has been explored and validated as a truth within many spiritual traditions is almost a caricature of our culture’s obsession with scientific “proof.” How can we trust ourselves to find our own path to healing when people around us are trained to ask: Can that be proven scientifically? Has that been validated with medical tests? Is that what your doctor thinks?
In this book, I use subjective information to guide the discussion as much as possible: I prefer using anecdotes that illuminate concepts and understandings rather than offering scientific studies to prove my points. This is a nonscientific form of discourse. You might ask yourself whether it bothers you to not have science repeatedly cited as an authority. Can what I am saying be true if I don’t cite some study that proves it? I am not saying science is always wrong, nor am I rejecting science. Instead, I think focusing solely on science deflects us from understanding the communications of our bodies and minds. It undermines our confidence in our ability to participate in our own healing and it curtails other ways of knowing.
Be Willing to Be an Exception to the Rule
Allopathic medicine is based on studies that prove statistically that something is true or effective. A medication or treatment must work for a given percentage of people studied before it is approved for use, though sometimes the demonstrated effectiveness of a medication is not much greater than its placebo effect! There are good reasons for insisting a medication work for many, but this shuts out usages that might help individuals. Herbalists believe individualized potions are more effective than just giving the same generic treatment to everyone with the same complaint.
Years ago, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I had a client who told me he had healed his AIDS. He had been tested (a number of times) as HIV positive, and then he caught pneumonia, which bumped his diagnosis to active AIDS. After he recovered from the pneumonia, he worked on his health using spiritual and nutritional approaches, and after eight years, he was consistently testing HIV negative. I was amazed and excited to hear his story. I asked: “What do your doctors say? Have you shared your story with others?” The belief at that time was that AIDS could not be survived, much less healed.
He said he was choosing to keep his story private, explaining, “When I tell people, they either don’t believe me or they believe I am in denial and will soon die. I have chosen not to live with their beliefs because that will overwhelm my own truth. So although I do occasionally get retested, I do not choose to live as an AIDS patient.”
This man was an exception, and life is full of splendid, amazing exceptions from whom we have much to learn. What he taught me was not to discount individual solutions or exceptions to the rule. I also learned to be more aware of the power of social beliefs in healing.
If everyone around you believes you can’t heal, it takes tremendous self-confidence and precious resources to break through that field of expectation to find your own path and truth, to become the exception to the rule.
Sue was a nurse who came to see me at the strong request of her partner, who believed in complementary medicine. Sue did not. But since she was scheduled to undergo a procedure the next day to have her thyroid irradiated (which essentially kills the nonfunctioning thyroid so they can balance your thyroid function through pills), she decided to give energy healing a try. I agreed to see her on the condition that, afterward, she have her thyroid blood levels retested before she went ahead with the planned medical procedure.
She agreed. When I tuned in to her throat energetically, I found that her thyroid had basically switched off. I used the language of energy to dialogue with her thyroid and move the switches to the on position. I could see the glandular tissue reanimate and return to normal functioning. I could hear it, the way you hear a refrigerator start up once you change the fuse that has blown a circuit.
She had gone off all thyroid medication in anticipation of the surgery and felt wiped out without it. Within a few minutes of resetting the switches, she reported (with some surprise) that she felt normal again. Joking, she asked, “Did you slip me a thyroid pill?” In a way I did. I activated the communication system of her energies to reanimate the gland, which in turn produced what her body needed!
The next day, Sue followed through on her promise and asked her doctor to test her thyroid levels one more time. The blood work came back showing normal on all parameters. The doctor was mystified. He asked her what she had done and whether she had somehow taken some thyroid medication, though he knew as a nurse she knew better. She told him about our session.
He barely let her get the words “energy healer” out of her mouth before hurrying to assure her that “idiopathic recovery” occasionally happened and telling her he was canceling her surgery. He asked her to return in a week to see if her levels were still adequate and her thyroid was still functioning. (It was.) What he didn’t do was show any interest or curiosity about her unique experience. He didn’t want to know more about energy healing or what led her to try it. He didn’t care that this individual had found a solution that might hold promise for other individuals. He had a name for what happened — idiopathic means unique to the individual — and therefore, it was not valid or interesting to him.
I have seen this response again and again as clients who experienced successful healing or self-healing encountered disbelief or dismissal from doctors, family, friends, and even within themselves. So I have come to see the wisdom of my ex-AIDS client who wanted to fly beneath the social radar. Using energy medicine successfully includes being willing to be an exception, to beat the odds, to defy gravity, to celebrate the unique capacities of our own bodies and energy systems. It is important to leave room for miracles in each dialogue we have with our own physical being. Experience has taught me that what is sometimes seen as a miracle is in fact just a matter of knowing how to communicate via energy.
Learn to Cultivate Evidence from Multiple Realms
I once accompanied a seventy-three-year-old friend with stage IV breast cancer through her medical experience. When she was diagnosed, the nurse said: “Now you’ll get the million-dollar treatment.” She was sent for test after test, shuffling from doctor to doctor, and found herself in a kind of cancer world where natives knew the routine and she was whirled from one invasive experience to another.
My friend wanted to participate in her own healing. She also wanted to know the scientific basis of the recommendations for the myriad decisions she needed to make. At each decision point, she would ask: “What do the studies say about this?” And after evasions and assurances that her doctors were recommending the best practice, she would ultimately discover they didn’t really know. The research was based on young women or not disaggregated for other key factors, like lifestyle or nutrition. The science just wasn’t there. And the “standard of care” recommendations were not based on women her age or with her self-care skills. They were essentially guesses, albeit educated guesses, masquerading as science.
At one point, my friend had to make the harrowing decision to reject further medical intervention, without the benefit of any relevant scientific evidence and against the standardized recommendations of her
